Weather this

Monday

Jun 24, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Extreme weather is not a recent phenomena.

Temperatures during World War II's Battle of the Bulge were the coldest on record in Europe. Allied troops froze to death in their foxholes, as casualties from exposure to the elements rivaled losses related to warfare.

Nine years prior to that, a four-month heat wave gripped the Plains states, exacerbating conditions laid low by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Without the benefit of widespread air-conditioning, Burlington residents suffered through 11 consecutive days where the temperature topped 100 degrees. Then, the next winter was one of the coldest ever.

That said, we've been warned global warming is making hot days hotter, rainfall heavier, storms stronger and droughts more severe. Last week we learned losses from extreme weather events in 2012 were the second worst in a generation. It just happened to be the warmest year recorded in the continental United States.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tallied the cost of the most expensive weather events, including the drought and Superstorm Sandy, and came up with $110 billion.

According to NOAA, the U.S. has seen 144 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The storms are more expensive mostly because of the sheer number of people and buildings in harm's way. But the frequency and severity of nasty weather also is a contributing factor.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama will to speak to the country about the challenges associated with climate change. Expect him to say before we can do anything, we must acknowledge climate change's existence and our role in perpetuating it. Scientists are unified on that point; coffee-counter experts and politicians, less so. Yet with each passing weather-generated disaster, climate deniers have a tougher time peddling their brand of skepticism.

Data helps, too.

An analysis of precipitation records from across the United States between 1948 and 2011 shows a couple troubling trends.

One, storms in general are spaced further apart, but their intensity is increasing. The strongest of these produce 10 percent more moisture than normal, and the really strong storms are 30 percent more frequent.

That means there are drier stretches between storms, which helps explain why in 2009 and 2010 we had back-to-back wet years with 45 percent more rain than usual (atop 2008, which was wet, but not exceedingly wet), but 2011 was dry and 2012 was drier than normal by a third.

The fear is these weather trends tend to compound. We already know the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record, surpassing the 1990s, which were warmer than the '80s.

Obama will tell us there is no single solution to deal with the consequences of climate change, but a reduction in greenhouse emissions will go a long way. Rather than looking at this as an economic burden, it should be viewed as an opportunity.

Consider what happened 40 years ago when President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water and Clean Air acts into law. Then, the U.S. economy was $4.75 trillion in today's dollars, as measured by GDP. Now, it's three times as big. Cleaning up the environment created an economy of its own, requiring special equipment with new entrepreneurial and employment opportunities.

Apart from wondering what the environment would look like without those pieces of legislation, there's no reason to believe reducing our carbon footprint won't have the same positive economic effect.

Already, technological advances have given us an abundance of natural gas - a resource we thought in the 1970s was being exhausted. It burns more efficiently and more cleanly than coal.

With a glut of natural gas, the price has tumbled, and, as a consequence, surprise, we're using less coal - a fact the careful observer might have noticed with the number of coal trains lumbering through town to and from the Powder Basin.

Unfortunately, hydraulic fracturing is the technology giving us all that natural gas. Better known as fracking, evidence suggests it's contaminating groundwater and contributing to increased seismic activity. Earthquakes.

But it's not like we have to pick our poison. There are alternative energy resources that are as clean as they are green. Iowa has two major utility companies, MidAmerican is committed to generating more electricity from environmentally cleaner sources, and last month it announced a $1.9 billion project to generate 1,050 megawatts of power via wind generators within two years. MidAmerican's residential electric rates are about 9 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to Alliant's 10.9 cents. Obviously, being good stewards doesn't have to be achieved on the backs of ratepayers.

That's not to suggest confronting climate change won't pose special challenges - especially for farmers. New kinds of hybrids will need to be developed to deliver good yields regardless if it's a wet year, dry year or something in between.

Intense storms also will require rethinking soil conservation measures. Gully-washers are called that for a reason. Waterways and riparian buffers will need to be widened, which means taking land out of production.

Science leaves little room for doubt that our climate is changing. Temperature logs prove that, the frequency of weather events proves that. Burlington, after all, has seen nine of it 10 worst floods in the past 25 years. Nobody's in favor of even more frequent flooding.

The sooner there's agreement there's a problem, the sooner we can go about trying to fix it.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.

Extras

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
The Hawk Eye Newspaper ~ 800 South Main Street, PO Box 10, Burlington, IA 52601-0010 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service